The key to improving call center performance? Diversification

The contact center should play a central role in your digitalization strategy; a fully optimized contact channel strategy will improve the customer experience and increase online and offline sales. Thousands of contacts flow from your website to the contact center every year, and often back again. This presents thousands of opportunities to understand what drives contacts to the call center, and use this insight to improve the online customer experience.

These opportunities are far too often overlooked. A lot of businesses that are focused on digitalization fail to take advantage of one of the most important digital channels that exists between business and consumer: the phone.

So many businesses are missing out because they have failed to consider the most traditional of channels when driving digital change.

The relationship between a business and its consumers has changed

Along with the ever-growing number of touchpoints between a business and its consumers, the customer’s expectation of what their relationship with a company involves has also changed. As consumers, we’re always on, all the time. Technology has lowered our patience threshold. It’s increased our hunger for choice. When we’ve got a problem, we know that we deserve quick, relevant, and personalized assistance.

That belief is now so deeply embedded in us that when a company fails to match our expectations, when a company isn’t always on, or fails to record information that we have inputted during our customer journey, it can really sour the relationship.

Aside from customer service, all of the lost links in the chain that hold a business and its consumers together has a real impact on the bottom line. Thousands of contacts passing through your contact center means thousands of opportunities to sell. Thousands of contacts also potentially lost.

Don’t let digital change leave you behind

Keeping pace with change is one of the cornerstones of success in the digital age. One really effective way of regaining control is by diversifying your contact center.

Lots of contact centers operate in silos. Silos restrict cross-departmental communication and impact your capacity to impart change – read more about why you should break away from a siloed approach in this whitepaper.

Diversify your contact center by creating several small teams, each manned by multi-skilled agents. And have them sit together. Have an open floor for communication between, say, the web support team and the live chat team. Make it so that they can easily collaborate with each other to deliver the best possible experience.

A diversified contact center leads to happier customers

Expanding the team to include agents who are able to support customers across more than one channel means that there will be far better communication between agents, and a better understanding of each individual consumer’s needs. Customers don’t want to sit on hold as they are transferred from one agent to another. They don’t want any steps in their journey to be forgotten, forcing them to repeat information that they’ve already shared. A diversified team will help to calm these frustrations.

If you take time to diversify your contact center, are not afraid of testing and learning from new ideas, have an agile approach to development and are flexible to make any changes that would benefit the growth of the team, then you should be well positioned to stay abreast of future digital change.

Whether you fully realize it or not, the contact center is already playing a big role in the way that a consumer interacts with your business. By innovating and diversifying away from long-standing systems and procedures, it should well become one of your most valued digitalization resources.